DISCUSSION

Consensus among 9p players (9dan professionals) is that AlphaGo will lose. AlphaGo is strong but not in the same class as 9p players, especially not Lee Sedol. Source: https://smartgo.com/blog/lee-sedol-vs-alphago.html

Google never throws $1m money recklessly.
One developer at DeepMind said he would be "very disappointed" if AlphaGo lose.
And he alluded that using "tricks" might work for defeating AlphaGo, which showed enough confidence of winning witout the opponent "cracking the system".
1 year of AI evolution was huge, DeepMind team has 5-month extra time for improving their system further since October.
I would be grateful if human side has a chance of 50/50 winning the match.

"Hassabis said most Go players are giving Sedol the edge over AlphaGo. They give us a less than 5 percent chance of winning but what they dont realize is how much our system has improved, he said. Its improving while Im talking with you.

AlphaGo backing:
Amateurs' database was used for the Fan Hui match, still AlphaGo won.
(easy room for advancements, https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/43g2jl/synopsis_of_myungwan_kims_analysis_of_fan_hui_vs/czjbml1)
Machines make no mistakes, are of steady performance.

Lee Sedol backing:
Too fast for the machine to overtake human top professionals.
Humans have creativity.

Since I am also a human being, I want Lee Sedol to win, but not sure how much time is left until a top human loses.

#5670, that is only what is offered at the current odds. As soon as someone takes this odds for 284mBTC new odds will be offered. It is the same here - the current odds (which are terrible - 1.4 for both sited compared to 1.9 on Fairlay) are also only good for a small amount the more you bet - the worse your odds will get.

#5762 : A lot more people are watching the outcome of this than you might think. Machine Learning (the algo that powers AlphaGo) is a hot button topic these days. It was at the center of many discussions in Davos.

Anyone who's basing their prediction on how "close" the game was between AlphaGo and FanHui fails to understand how Monte-Carlo tree search algos work : they favor 99.99% chance of winning by 0.5 stones vs 99% chance of winning by 5 stones (they try to maximize odds of winning, but do not try to maximize score difference). Hence : AG vs. FanHui, it is easy to believe AG was "close" to FanHui. It was likely holding out.

On any other betting site without the "weight" if you see 1 yes pays 1 and 1 no pays 1 you would obviously assume the odds were 50/50 and the "pays" is in addition to the stake and not the total.

The whole reason for the weight is to scam people. What is the purported reason given for it? How is a bet made now worth a huge multiple less of a bet made two weeks ago? It actually discourages bets on the site.

As I predicted: AlphaGo wins. Not by a big score difference, but it ground down the puny human in a mechanical and systematic manner, nurturing the gap between her and Lee, but never making it so big so as to discourage the opponent. Amazing feat (and progress of AI).

Again, the exact same behaviour at the end of the game : the AI knows with high probability that it will win and lets the human believe that it's catching up when it has in fact no chance whatsoever. Cat playing with a mouse.

"lets the human believe that it's catching up when it has in fact no chance whatsoever. Cat playing with a mouse."

The algorithms don't work like this. It's sole goal is to win, not mess with someones head. It will press it's advantage as far as possible, regardless of how high the current probability of winning is.

This is correct, but.. a human player usually confuses this with being more points ahead. When AlphaGo is presented with two possible moves, and it thinks that one move will win with half a point and a probability of 99%, and another move would win 10 points ahead with a probability of 95%, then it will go for the strategy that only wins with half a point ahead, because after all winning is winning and it prefers the higher probability of winning over winning high.

So when AlphaGo is ahead in the game, it is not pursuing more points, unless this is also the _best_ strategy to improve its probability of winning.

Of course, in most cases gaining more points also increases the probability of a win, but it might not be the best strategy if all you care about is winning the game.

Human players are much more inclined to use the number of points ahead as proxy for how "safe" a win is. Because of this it is easy to confuse AlphaGo's behavior with "not trying anymore" when it is ahead in the game.

"The result is nevertheless what I describe."
You're anthropomorphizing the actions of AlphaGo, it is not letting the human believe it will catch up, or otherwise playing with them.. Such statements don't lead to a healthy understanding of how AlphaGo works, there are enough bruised egos on this thread as it is..

#5831, I hadn't noticed that, thanks for pointing it out. That said, I just skimmed through the post and don't fully understand it (sounds like someone figured out a way to arbitrage this system?), so if someone can add a non-technical TL;DR, I'd appreciate it!

mircea popescu, the miserable asshole who handles the money for this site made a mistake when creating a bet payout. He doesn't want to own up to that mistake and tries to blame the whole thing on some fantasy "chinese miner consipracy". In fact it was worse than a mistake: he was just being a his usual cheap ass and created a zero fee TX which was not included in any block for a long time. He then created a second one and unlucky for the dumbass both tx went through.

The creator of the site and mircea are now in a dispute over a miserable 17 coins and all payouts are frozen.

Oddly I'm glad I didn't bet more even thought I won. It was my first, and probably last bet on this site.

It seems that it is the position of the maintainers of this site that they are unable to pay out the bets because of some sort of Chinese miner conspiracy against them. Have they attempted to pay out all of the currently resolved bets, or did they conclude it was impossible after some of the transactions had the issue outlined in the link at the top of this page?

Why don't they attempt to pay out all resolved bets now with a reasonable mining fee so that they can say that they at least did that? Perhaps there would be evidence of these attempted transactions even if they don't end up in a block, but I'm not familiar enough with Bitcoin to know for sure what that evidence might be.

If it is indeed true that the Chinese miners, or anyone, are able to systematically exclude the transactions of a given payer then that's a tremendous weakness in Bitcoin.

Wow. I can't believe the lack of integrity here. This was my first and only use of Bitcoin because I was interested in the concept and wanted to give it a try for something unique and was willing to have some trust and take a gamble -- but now I realize how scandal prone the thing is. Never betting here, or probably anywhere else, again.

#5872, he's set it up like the other scammers he liked to point out, whereby he's in control and should anything go wrong the other side loses, your best bet it to view anything you get now as a gracious donation.

And view all those in on the feast of customers' money as the scammers they are. MP by default takes the lot, but the other parasites are swarming already. The buzz is deafening.

i wish there was another site where one could bet on whether bitbet will return the funds or not. i guess in finance this is called a credit default swap (CDS) and these things have been around for the last 25 years, but the crypto space hasn't yet graduated to this notion....

MP and the bitcoin-assets crew have on average the social skills of a pack of hyenas in heat, but they're AFAICT a fairly honest bunch.

Historically, Mircea has in fact been a strong resource for fighting and debunking scams, and I am fairly certain he'll end up doing the right thing - hopefully before the whole world completely loses interest in bitbet and the site becomes worthless.

The only real risk is what "doing the right thing" will end up being in MP's sometimes bizarro moral values model.

Another possible explanation for the current mess is that MP is conducting an experiment in conflict resolution in the brave new world of btc-powered corporations.

BitBet is on the verge of collapse / liquidation after double paying Jeb Bush RNOM 17.93766065 BTCs.
Please save BitBet by returning accidentally-sent Bitcoins back to the corresponding betting addresses.
If you are a holder in good faith, please act now:

#5885, these are evidence of double paying everyone can see:
bf77bf5ec7c02f4027caab024d5581d82bdea97ab8d7d97aac856169c038dd31
and
de9bc173174f5ae97e7fe0d2e171647cade189c76f9cbe48f37494c973aca2e4

17.93766065 BTCs are Bitcoins gained for no legitimate reason, or gained at the expense of the unfortunate accident. It was like suddenly hit by a storm on a calm sea. Returning coins back is one way to cure the damage.

0.01929717 from 1D1jMVvtskv5RX8YcmwtgXyeRHDizaoohb
0.05810562 from 14wqgUXyHpuzyuwfYssfeLuL1YtZpeVkcR
0.11743359 from 14kTaLfMJ5VPKWufEzAcZCTZ741LZLCVMd
0.46776462 from 197GetzehgtbDaSxyLzWDSnq8TTrsL9mwu
0.14375522 from 1LqEMRTSU4E59zEhX8zrVTP5Un5t4AwvDX
0.01103423 from 19qvvDa1rw6gqVuQTMy677rfLtMZj3UeXH
2.19349534 from 16LZuQiLqRU1c36fX2QF5msi6FNaLhx3CP
0.21539022 from 1Fg8GQBDrHyzCFdkLaSQtCckpeW5cZ2Sa
0.53520508 from 18SHQxoDWPViDM6Puae46WNv6PZaoAFGHB
0.53434890 from 18TqEY8eK5CZ9ChX8714ThtsKySjznXVsU
0.01387644 from 1Pvve54XzuUzVu4Hru44JXWuSP6zcTo7qo
0.01128196 from 1PGX5YxZbJFFTHTJoPhPwZbjuMZnxYRUyw
0.05286467 from 1Gqq5BmhdN7GNcbiUCUR7gFws2WUnAMaYx

These 4.37385306 BTCs could be recovered by applying an extraordinary fee on next payouts.
Considering the amount of BTCs in pending bets, an approximative 1% extra fee till the end of 2016 on all bets will be more than sufficient.

I hope that writing down a few numbers can help everybody to clarify and solve the situation.

I would really not flush down the WC www.bitbet.us for a 4.37385306 BTC net loss.
Seriously, we are talking about "peanuts" here and this issue can be easily solved without having to write another sad page in short bitcoin history.

Hope this help.
Good luck everybody.

David Francois : I will share this proposal on the link provived. Thanks for your interest.

For a betting website, promoting anonymity, which uses bitcoins, trust is essential for people to place bets.

Trust which is now broken.

Lack of attempts and the lethargic approach towards current events shows signals the owner doesn't care much anymore. Maybe stealing, maybe try sell the place and leave a mess, maybe running into problems with impatient winners.

The reason is that the payout tx fee might very well exceeds the revenue from such small bets.
One can roughly estiamte the cost of sending payout txes per bet with the formula: 1801+341 = 214 bytes.
So the cost per bet is the price of 214 bytes in one block. One reasonable price is e.g. 20 satoshis per byte.
The cost is 21420 = 4280 satoshis, while the revenue from 1) is 1220 satoshis.
Maybe since Mircea have been intuitively able to understand this, he often made 0-fee txes.

The reason is that the payout tx fee might very well exceeds the revenue from such small bets.
One can roughly estiamte the cost of sending payout txes per bet with the formula: 180+34 = 214 bytes.
So the cost per bet is the price of 214 bytes in one block. One reasonable price is e.g. 20 satoshis per byte.
The cost is 214 times 20 = 4280 satoshis, while the revenue from 1) is 1220 satoshis.
Maybe since Mircea have been intuitively able to understand this, he often made 0-fee txes.

#5912 : that doesn't make him less of an idiot. If he had indeed identified this as a problem (remains to be seen), he should have set a minimum bet amount instead of playing games with the BTC fee system. It's all the more unforgivable that if there is one person that understands how bitcoin works, it would be mp